Maybe you already saw this recent Democracy Now! interview, but I’ve been thinking specifically about Zizek’s final words in terms of “escaping the house,” ever since we had that conversation.
My contention (via my interpretation of Deleuze) was and still is: engagement is futile. The house will always win. Zizek seems to agree:
AMY GOODMAN: Last words to leave our audience with here in the United States and, well, all over in Latin America, in Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: From me?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It will be simply—OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don’t beat—don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, “You’re doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat.
Today’s hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?
What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don’t do the job. We even don’t have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call “cognitive mapping,” you know, that you get an idea what’s going on. We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.
How can you be sure that ‘the house’ itself did not distribute the idea “The house will always win”? See for example Sublime Object of Ideology, where Zizek cites Marx’s analysis of being a King in Das Capital to illustrate this reading. A King is only King because his subjects loyally think and act like he is King. Yet, at the same time, the people will only believe he is King if they believe that this is a deeper Truth about which they can do nothing.
Doing nothing becomes then, not liberal choice, but one of many strategies we can deploy at differing points and time. Indeed, Zizek in your example above is far from advocating neutral passive inaction–but urging us to develop our critical thinking. What are you doing? Is it working, or has it been co-opted/corrupted? This is a project that seeks to develop and deploy challenges to hegemony that instigate revolutionary change, not a mode of defeat or acceptance.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, MLA.
I’m glad someone has taken the bait – so to speak – and thus initiated this discussion.
To answer your question, “How can you be sure that ‘the house’ itself did not distribute the idea “The house will always win”?” I would remind you of something Chairman Mao said in his “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942):
“We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.”
The objective fact is: the house always wins. That’s the reason why it’s the house. If it didn’t win, then it wouldn’t be the house. (Casino as quintessential example of circular logic.)
This is not to say that individuals cannot experience small victories, on the contrary: there must be small victories or else no one would play. Small victories are a form of incentive. But inherent in them is the problem.
To take this analogy out of the casino and into the “real world” this means that individuals must occasionally see small victories in order that they will continue to participate – otherwise they might become apathetic or – gasp! – unwilling to engage. This would be bad for the house, since the house needs individuals to maintain it. So a small victory here and there is actually part of the house’s plan: Let them think they’re making headway, then they will continue to feed us.
But at the end of the day, the house will stand. This is, as Mao would have it, an objective fact.
So, then, where does that leave us? I agree with you, MLA, Zizek is urging us to develop our critical thinking skills, but I disagree with you when you suggest that he is advocating the “deployment of challenges to hegemony.” That idea seems to be missing the point entirely. Action is exactly the opposite of what Zizek’s suggesting. “Instigating revolutionary change” would mean action and he has clearly asserted, “We must withdraw.”
In other words, action is participation and participation is not working.
Now is the time to stop participating.
To bring it back to your Sublime Object of Ideology analogy, so long as the people participate in the kingdom the king will have power. But if the people stop participating, the king loses his power.
Remember: any act against the state only legitimizes the state.
Thus, as they say in Vegas, the only way to win is not to play.
This, to me, is one of the liberating concepts D&G invite us to consider. How exactly they make this suggestion could be the topic of a different conversation. For now, I think the important thing to think about is this notion of disengagement, which I don’t see as “a mode of defeat or acceptance.”
To think of disengagement in those terms means that your perspective is based on a premise constructed by the house. The first thing I would do is question those assumptions: “defeat or acceptance” are exactly the terms the house wants you to use. They certainly wouldn’t want you to think kindly of disengagement, would they? Disengagement is their worst nightmare! As I stated before, the house needs you to feed it. If you disengage it means you aren’t feeding it, thus you are continually taught that disengagement is a bad thing. You are taught that disengagement is irresponsible, defeatist, etc.
This is a lie propagated by the house.
Disengagement is the only truly revolutionary action.
I would argue for a different reading. Zizek is advocating a very specific, time limited, type of disengagement. He urges that we “don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency”, which is not the same as saying “don’t engage into a discourse of humanitarian emergency”. It is the fake/hegemonic aspect that Zizek is highlighting. Thus, his disengagement could be better understood as a retreat into thought for the purpose of reformulating the attack rather than as you suggest “disengagement is the only truly revolutionary action”.
(At the risk of introducing another analogy) for Zizek, engaging with today’s hegemonic ideology is like tackling a Hydra, where upon cutting off one of its heads two grow back in its place. Our successful beheadings only produce two more points of oppression where there was previously only one. Or, the greater our progress the stronger the enemy becomes. Zizek argues we are not paying attention to the bigger picture-while we congratulate ourselves on the limited success of our (local) beheadings capitalism escapes into the background (universal) and multiplies its facets. Therefore we need to disengage in order that we may rethink this attack. But we disengage with the proviso that we will re-engage at a future date. Disengaging is a strategic, finite, reconfiguration of thought in order that we may fight again. Or, we might say, Zizek is seeking Iolaus. For it was Iolaus who helped Hercules defeat the Hydra by scorching each freshly cut neck stump with a firebrand, sealing them shut and thus destroying its regenerating abilities. Indeed, this ‘act’ of Iolaus-passing beyond an impasse-is, I would argue, exactly what Zizek is demanding. Our disengagement should be used to formulate a new mode of attack.
So, while I would not dispute the notion of disengagement (actively, consciously, thoughtfully doing nothing is one of many strategies we can deploy at differing points and time), I would disagree that it is the only strategy. If it is, the house (and your advocacy of its totalising abilities) would (eventually) codify a response in which we become caught.
I would argue-contra to Zizek/yourself-that the problem becomes the way we have assumed the totality of the house’s power and authority. What if the house is nothing but the projection of our own making-the (necessary)(paternal) figure we create in order to avoid our own complicitness in the horrors of the world? The Hydra is after all a myth that we tell ourselves.